Racism in Sports

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I would say that functionalism is the most relevent when it comes to sports and theories.
Functionalist such as parsons and Durkheim look at society in a postive way, and by this they go on to focus on how people in society must work and have some connection together for society to go on working well. With functionalism there is the idea of the 'human body analogy'. Aguste Comte suggested that the agenst in society, such as families, the government, econmy etc, can represent the organs in a body. The idea is that if one of these organs was to fail or stop working correctly, the rest of the body would suffer the consequences. Equally this would happen in society if just one agent was affected. This may seem irrelevent to sport, but if you consider that if one player got hurt, this could affect the wrest of a teams morale or chances of winning! Functionalism also considers that society is like a living organism that changes, adapts and develops over time. This could also represent the sporting world in terms of new teams and a games development over the years.

Functionalists also see tha a structure is key. Structure gives a person a reason or organiseation in life, which enables society to get things done. Equally each team player or athlete follows some kind of structure to achieve their goals and play a role on a team. For example in basket ball, a goal shooters aim and role is to score hoops for his team.

Each sports team or group of people must follow a consensus to arrange what is correct and what is agreed to be the right or wrong idea about something. In a way you could say that a sports team, i.e football must all have a meeting and consensus to achieve something together.

Social solidarity is another functionalist factor as it focuses on how a team come together and are united, this would be key for a succesful sports team!
We must also consider that a person would need to join this sports team at some point, and that is simply know as Social intergration. (Joining and becoming an active role in society).
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From ( yahoo answers)

As for racism that I have witness, when I was in high school we used to play a lot of basketball and it was usually among Chinese and Malays. On one occasion, there was a Nigerian student that wanted to play with us but we turned him down. It wasn’t that he could not play well, we had plenty of beginners. Nor was he rude or rough. It just felt that we didn’t like another foreign race to join us and play. To me, I felt that this is racism.